The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Let's call it, say, among other things, an existential contraption.

...a problem well put is half solved.

Not counting mine of course.

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

After all, look at us.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

He means music of course.

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

Not if the whole point of education is, say, the mass production of wage slaves.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Most of what people think is philosophy is actually psychology, and most of what people think is psychology is actually marketing.

Imagine then if this were not actually altogether false?

If you didn't leave facebook when you started getting music recommendations from people you haven't wanted to talk to in 15 years, you probably won't care that facebook sold your private data to Donald Trump.

So, what do you think he's doing with yours?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

And I will show you something different from eitherYour shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at evening rising to meet youI will show you fear in a handful of dust

Or, for some, quite the opposite.

I can connectNothing with nothing

From the cradle to the grave as it were.

In my end is my beginning

Unless of course it is the other way around.

The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Reason has nothing to do with it. Or none that [so far] has ever been pointed out to me.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest---for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

Which part makes sense to you?

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Cue, among others, Maurice Conchis.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.

Let's file this one under, "she thinks too much."

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Sounds like me, doesn't it?

Relationality is not only a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.

Sounds like me, doesn't it?

Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of "sovereignty" of the nation, where "sovereignty" denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.

In other words, they have their ruling class and we have ours.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.”

Not unlike all the other ones.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

Not that there still aren't consequences of course.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Yes, but it still pales next to the need to feel understood. And not even utterly.

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

Including our memories of the future.

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll.

As, say, the days become weeks become months.

You can't go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay.

Yes, he may have a point there.

Sometimes the worst thing about change is the shock of the change itself and not actually the new circumstances.

You know, when it's not clearly both.

I also understood how events or circumstances could cascade out of control and your entire ability to deal with the present can be lost.

Perhaps, he thought, but I wrote the book.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don't speak bird.

What's that got to do with it?

Practice makes perfect, but nobody's perfect, so why practice?

To be the first?

I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends.They're in my head.

So, did they help him to pull the trigger?

I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.

He probably means you, asshole.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Let's apply this to, say, serious philosophy?

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

Lesson learned? Only God knows what really happened.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

If not the worst possible time to be alive.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

In other words, for some of us, what's left of it. And not just intuitively.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

If you ever mature at all.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

Hmm. And if you dreamed you were a maggot?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

Of course this doesn't work for everyone.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

Not counting all the times it couldn't be further from the truth.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

Had to Google this one:

"Here's a word that immediately communicates two things (to those who understand it): the discourse referred to is light, and the person speaking or writing is erudite. ... Thus, it is a high-toned means of blowing discourse away like dust."

Who would want any more of that.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Probably includes most of the ladies too.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.

Obviously with exceptions.

She was not herself--she was not anything. She was something that is going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

Did he ever get back to us on this?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone --- the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.

So, can you live with that?

Is there anything more frightening than people?

Next stupid question.

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

Many even volunteering to.

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

What's your own rendition of this?

I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.

Like the two are never connected.

'Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.'

Capitalism!

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Not including me of course.

For people to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Especially including you of course.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.

Today we call it the postmodern world. Could even Mill have imagined it?

One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.

And how scary is that? As, for example, a double edged sword.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future.

Maybe that explains me then. How about you?

Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

Let's decide: genes or memes?

It's no coincidence that the Constitution didn't mention "the pursuit of happiness", which the Declaration of Independence called an inalienable right.

True, but what exactly does that mean? What lesson here is to be learned?

For most Americans, especially now, striving and insecurity are likely to be rewarded with more striving and insecurity; you can do everything right and still have little to show for it.

How about you Brits?

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems.I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?”“I didn’t want to miss recess.”A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time.“Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her.For me this was like asking why I should breathe.“None of my friends do it,” Lulu added.“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it.“But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added.“Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit. It’s what separates the good students from the bad students.""Aww - recess is so fun," Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States.Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

On the other hand, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. No, seriously.

Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation's identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition -- pure political tribalism.

Who does this remind you of?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.

Is that even possible? Ever happened to you?

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

The human condition as it were.

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

The human condition as it were.

The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair.

Sounds more like a spiral to to me.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

Cue the bonfires.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

What the hell does that even mean, he thought. Then it dawned on him.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound.

And let's not forget RM/AO.

What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory.

A theory in theory as it were.

Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we’ll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science.

We've got a few of them here, don't we?

Most kinds of matter are under pressure, but the dark energy is under tension---that is, it pulls things together rather than pushes them apart. For this reason, tension is sometimes called negative pressure. In spite of the fact that the dark energy is under tension, it causes the universe to expand faster. If you are confused by this, I sympathize. One would think that a gas with negative pressure would act like a rubber band connecting the galaxies and slow the expansion down. But it turns out that when the negative pressure is negative enough, in general relativity it has the opposite effect. It causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.

One suspects however that they happen anyway.

I understood Einstein's general theory of relativity, which meant that I knew how to demonstrate every essential property of it in a page or less of concise and transparent work. It seemed to me that if you understood a theory, it shouldn't take weeks of calculations on an art pad to check its basic properties.

Let's put your own theory to the test then.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content, but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

For better or for worse? Definitely.

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

Among others, he's talking about me.

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

Care to broach a few of your own?

Villains! I shrieked. Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

Me, I'm taking the deed to the grave.

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect --- they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul --- not of intellect, or of heart.

Though still no less in the soul of the beholder.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

You'd think any child would know that.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.

I know that I didn't. On the other hand, what does that even mean?

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

True, but, come on, really, what the fuck are perfect stories?

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

All the way back to, say, before the Big Bang.

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

More to the point, we all just are people, and none of us know what that really means.

Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Or there sure as hell can be.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

Indeed, that was once even applicable to me.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

On the other hand, imagine Aristotle with a smart phone.

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an "ism" becomes so involved in reaction against other "isms" that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.

Think about that, Mr. Objectivist.

To me faith means not worrying.

That and tithing.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Actually, the most important attitude lies in recognizing the limits of what can be learned. For example, in the is/ought world.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

How disconcerting is that then?

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

Does the stone know that?

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.